anhosting

What Happened This Weekend

I decided that I would do a reformat of my WordPress installation and as part of that reformat, I would install WordPress 2.7 beta 2. I also plan on doing a redesign of the site to make everything much more simpler than before. However, things didn’t go as planned thanks to my webhosting provider, AnHosting a.k.a. MidPhase. Starting on 11/07/2008 4:37 PM I sent in a trouble ticket to MidPhase letting them know that I was experiencing timeout error messages when browsing to my domain. Cpanel, email, anything dealing with my account was loading slower than molasses. I became increasingly upset as I updated the ticket on 11/08/2008 2:20 AM. Ten hours went by without anyone responding to my trouble ticket. This is the first time I’ve had an experience like this with MidPhase and it was pretty frustrating.

Once two more hours went by with no update to my ticket or the situation, I called the support line for MidPhase and because it was so early in the morning, I didn’t have to deal with a queue. After talking with the gentleman and having him confirm the issues I was experiencing, he told me that a support rep has been assigned to my ticket and he would look into it. The rep responded to my ticket on 11/08/2008 4:36: AM.

By the way, I should point out that the entire problem was based around the CPU load on the shared server being to high, not allowing other things to process. It was increasingly frustrating to me because I wouldn’t think zapping whatever processes were hogging up the CPU would be that hard to shut down. What made things worst is that I had deleted my WordPress files along with the database and because I couldn’t access PHPMyAdmin or various other parts of Cpanel let alone getting my site to load, my domain was stuck on a WordPress installation error.

stupidcpu

The last time I updated the ticket was on 11/08/2008 5:26 AM. I basically had enough at this point and just hoped that things would be better after I woke up. Thankfully, things did get back to normal. Then, because my shared server was one of the ones that was recently migrated into a new data center, the file upload limit in the php.ini file was set to 2mb which means I couldn’t upload and import my WordPress WXR file. After going back and forth a few times with support, they managed to get that changed enabling me to have a successful import. The support for this particular issue was much better than the previous one.

So, that is where I stand now. I am currently configuring the plugins I know I am going to use. After that, I plan on working on the theme to get things simplified and straightened out. Special thanks to everyone who contacted me asking me what happened. Obviously, visiting a site that all of a sudden has a hello world post on it with the default Kubrick theme is a cause for concern. I appreciate those who sent me a message expressing their willingness to help if need be. Thank you.

Nothing malicious happened to the site, I just happened to go through with my WordPress reformat which I sometimes do but it turned out to be a series of badly timed events. Hopefully, things are all better now.

What A Weekend

Anhosting Problems

Oi, what a weekend. After having to cancel my show on Friday evening because of a very sick Lorelle and tornadoes knocking at my door, I discovered on Saturday that I couldn’t access my very own blog nor could I access my email. During the day, I noticed that other people were able to browse my domain. In fact, it looked as though everyone EXCEPT me could browse my domain. After submitting a support ticket to AnHosting, I went through the run of the mill trouble shooting process. At one point, they told me it looked like my public IP address had been blocked by their firewall. After giving them my IP address and having it removed, the problem remained.

Sunday rolls around and my problem is yet to be resolved. On a whim, I decided to contact the LIVE web chat that AnHosting provides. After talking to a representative for awhile, I was told which server my account was on and that I was not the only one having problems. Apparently, AnHosting’s upstream provider was having a routing issue which was causing some clients not to be able to connect to the site at all while others were able to access the domain.

Monday afternoon comes around and the problem still exists. At this point, I’ve gone three days with no access to my inbox. Not having access to my inbox for three days really reminded me just how much I rely on email for communication, perhaps a little too much. Thank goodness for Twitter though as I used that to keep everyone up to date as to what was going on. I also used Twitters Direct Messaging feature to keep in touch with people.

It’s 3 P.M. Monday afternoon and I post a message to Twitter explaining how upset I am at the thought of having an inbox with 100 emails. As it turns out, not 5 minutes later did access to my inbox and my domain return.

So there you have it, thats why you might of come across the blog and noticed I was gone when in fact, everyone except me could browse the site. This has been the first major problem I’ve had with AnHosting so I’m not all that upset. In fact, this really reminds me that even though the internet is a chain, when one of those chain links break, it can affect everyone from that link on back and brings the question into mind, just how reliable is the internet as a whole? At any rate, I was pretty pleased with the support I received from the folks at AnHosting and I still recommend them to anyone who is looking for a good quality, reliable webhost.

On a very unrelated note, I went to go see a movie called Leatherheads starring George Clooney with my girlfriend Monday evening. If you’re into old time flicks mixed with a bit of comedy, I recommend checking this one out for yourself.

A romantic comedy set in the world of 1920s football, where the owner of a professional team drafts a strait-laced college sensation, only to watch his new coach fall for his fiancée.

Time To Pimp Your Webhost

AnHosting Logo

All too often, folks who operate their own blog or website take the opportunity to ridicule their web host when things don’t go as planned. I’d like to change that mentality and actually say some great things about my particular host. When I started this blog back in May of 2007, I typed in a few keywords into Google and came across AnHosting.

When I discovered these guys, I didn’t know a thing about them. After browsing around the webhosting-talk forums, I found a couple of forum threads praising these guys, so I decided to purchase a webhosting account through them. I’m hosting on the All Inclusive Mega Plan (for 1 year) which costs me $83.40 per year. That comes out to being about $6.95 a month which is not bad at all. This plan included Cpanel, 15 gigs of space, a huge amount of bandwidth and all that jazz.

Since I purchased my account in May, I’ve experienced only one major downtime episode. This was because AnHosting switched data centers which is completely understandable if you ask me. Other than that outage, my site has been offline a few times every now and then, but within a few minutes or so, it comes back online. This could be a problem on my end, or my actual site going offline, I don’t know. At any rate, AnHosting has been a very reliable and responsive hosting company.

Sure, I’m not good enough to grace the servers of MediaTemple, but good webhosting companies are hard to come by when you consider that anyone that can afford a payment of $30.00 per month for a reseller account can be a webhost. So far, AnHosting has definitely won me over in an impressive fashion and if this keeps up, I’ll be renewing the account in no time.

By the way, AnHosting has a really sweet Christmas deal going on where you can purchase a hosting account for only $4.95 per month instead of the $6.95 I paid. Also included with their new accounts is double everything. Double the bandwidth, double the space, double the domains on one account. (Man I feel like I screwed myself) The deal ends on December 26th. So if you were thinking of moving from your current provider, this would be a good time at a good price to do so.